League of Dragons (16 page)

“Alone?” Laurence said, and looked at Tharkay, who shook his head doubtfully.

“What I heard in Istanbul was three dragons, traveling in company,” he said, “but rumor on the streets is often amplified; I would not rely upon it.”

“I must stop them,” Temeraire said, “but I must be sure not to hurt the egg—oh! If I should use the divine wind upon them, and the shell were to—” He could not finish, his voice breaking off into misery.

“We must try and pen them in,” Laurence said, looking at the narrow pass, “and ask the ferals to make something of a screen above them. If it is not a Fleur-de-Nuit, we may well take them by surprise, and they will not be sure the size of our party; caution may persuade them to surrender the egg. You are sure the other dragon will not think of harming the egg?”

“Unless it is Lien, herself,” Temeraire said venomously. “
She
would do anything, I am sure, even to a helpless egg: you see what she has done already!” He twisted his neck about to look as another feral landed, to chirp a new report: their quarry was perhaps ten miles distant, coming quickly.

They could not use the divine wind against the mountain-side for fear of warning the oncoming dragon; but Temeraire's weight and fury served well enough to tear down a great heap of stone and ice and snow to block the far mouth of the valley: still a terrible noise, but not an unfamiliar one in those mountains. On the ledge, Laurence cleaned and loaded his pistols, and the rifle he had brought with him from Vilna, and put fresh wicks on his pair of incendiaries. They would not do much to bring down a heavy-weight, but they might do to make a convincing show of arms; he lined the guns up in a row, ready to be fired off as quickly as possible. Tharkay also added his own pistol and rifle to the collection.

And then Temeraire returned to his perch, and they all held stiff and cold and silent, listening for the rhythmic flap of wings. The ferals—another five or so had joined them—gathered on either side, but in a much more celebratory spirit; they were quiet but chirping softly to one another, and Laurence caught more than once the exultant word for treasure passing among them.

But their voices fell silent, soon, and then they were listening, too: their prey was close. The Alpine ferals all sat up alertly, their narrow heads giving them a look of eager greyhounds trembling for the sign to spring. Laurence heard the dragon coming: if Granby had been here, he might have been able to say what the breed was, by the wing-gait. Laurence could not guess, but the beast that passed below their ledge was certainly a heavy-weight and a large one, throwing a long sinuous shadow blue on the blue snow, with drifting scraps of cloud clinging to its sides.

Temeraire managed to restrain himself until the dragon had gone through the pass; then he flung himself off the cliff in a leap, twisting as he did mid-air to come about, and then he roared—not in the dragon's direction, which might have threatened the egg, if the other beast was carrying it, but at the rock face.

The shattering force of the divine wind blasted the snow-laden peak on the other side of the pass, and an avalanche came roaring down: rock, snow, ice all together, a great cloud. Laurence squinted through his flying-goggles as snow spattered his face; the Alpine ferals had all jumped aloft and were keening their high-pitched hunting song as they went in circles over the valley, forming a ceiling for their trap. The cloud of snow and ice hid the other beast. Temeraire roared again, not the divine wind this time, only a challenge; he was hovering mid-air, darting a little to one side and then another, waiting for an opening to dive in.

Laurence glimpsed the shadow of the other dragon as it twisted around upon itself wildly, taken by surprise, turning towards them, and then a long painfully brilliant gout of flame came erupting through the cloud, dissolving the blizzard into boiling steam. A tongue of fire licked at the mountainside, and Laurence and Tharkay dived into the snowbank as the flames came spilling up the rock and past their ledge, heat and cold both intolerable at once. The dragon came roaring out behind its flames and struck Temeraire mid-sky, and the two beasts rolled, twisting around each other, hissing and furious. Alarmed, Laurence dug out of the snow, squinting uselessly: Flammes-de-Gloire did not travel alone; they were too rare for that; were there more beasts coming? He could see almost nothing of the struggle: his eyes were streaked with dazzle from the flames, and a handful of trees and scrub in the valley below had caught like dry tinder, blazing small suns that made the night around them into pitch.

But he did not need to see: he heard the snarling of the fire-breather's voice saying, in clear wrathful English, “Oh! How dare you leap on me out of the dark, like a coward! I will tear you into pieces, see if I don't!”

“Whatever are you doing here?” Temeraire said, struggling with a crushing sensation of disappointment. But if the egg had not come
this
way, surely it had gone another; he turned without waiting for an answer to Bistorta, who had at last crept cautiously back: the other ferals had scattered in high alarm at the torrents of flame. “What do you mean, setting me on Iskierka?” he demanded. “She is not a French dragon, at all; and where is the
egg
?”

Bistorta defended herself smartly. “How were we to know she was not a French dragon?” she said. “They have so many peculiar kinds; and anyway, you did not say you wanted a
French
dragon, you said you were looking for a heavy-weight and a fighting-dragon, and you cannot say she is not
that.
”

“What am I doing here?” Iskierka said, paying no attention to their conversation. “I am here for
my egg,
which you promised me and promised me would be perfectly safe in China, and should have an emperor as companion, and now only look what has happened! Why are
you
jumping out upon me out of nowhere like this? Granby, did you put him up to it? I did not think you would
betray
me so,” she added reproachfully, her head swinging around.

“I didn't, but you may be sure I would have done it in a heartbeat, if I had any notion of his being anywhere near,” Granby said without even a little hesitation as he clambered down her side. “Hell-bent on going straight into France, and bearding Lien in her den,” he told Laurence and Tharkay, as he shook their hands. “Nothing would hold her, when she knew. It was all I could do to persuade her we had to swing out over the Med, and not fly straight across over every Frenchman and French gun in Spain.”

He sat heavily down upon a boulder and rubbed his arm across his forehead. The golden hook which had taken the place of his left hand gleamed with reflected flame: half a dozen bushes and scrubby trees were still alight, where they clung to the walls of the mountains. His brown hair was unbraided and in a wind-tangled mess, his clothing disordered and his face unshaven, as though he had been flung dragon-back without any warning and dragged across Europe for days, very likely the case. He gratefully accepted the offer of Laurence's canteen.

“Well, that is quite absurd,” Temeraire said, “for if ever Lien gets the egg, she will have it well-hidden, and any number of soldiers and dragons guarding it.”

“It is
not
absurd,” Iskierka returned. “Of course we must go to her, if she has the egg. What use is there going anywhere else?” Which had an uncomfortable ring of truth to it, Temeraire had to admit; only that was plainly hopeless, so he could not allow Lien to have the egg, yet.

“When I have scorched her a few times, I dare say she will turn it over,” Iskierka continued. “What good did you suppose it would do for you to leap upon
me
?”

“I did not mean to!” Temeraire said. “We have been laying a trap for the dragons who are bringing the egg back from China.”

Iskierka snorted. “I see how well
that
plan has worked. If you cannot tell the difference between me and an egg-stealing French dragon, I do not see how you ever expected to get the egg back this way.”

“It is dark!” Temeraire said. “And I could not go and look closely at you, or else the
element of surprise,
” on which he laid especial emphasis, as a point of strategy that surely even Iskierka might understand, “should have been lost.”

She remained unimpressed. “It was certainly a surprise, because it was a ridiculous thing to do. What if the egg-stealer should be one of those night-flying dragons? I dare say she should have flown straight around you. I saw one of them yesterday evening at a distance, while I was trying to work my way around these wretched mountains, and I thought I should make her show me the way; but as soon as it was dark she managed to lose me, even though I should have had her in an hour in daylight—”

“What?” cried Temeraire, seizing upon this intelligence. “Where did you see her?”

“You are not paying attention; what difference does that make?” Iskierka said crossly, but when Temeraire had made her understand that a Fleur-de-Nuit had stolen the egg, and very likely it was the same one she had seen, she ceased to be quarrelsome at once.

There was no sense in retracing her steps, but Laurence, dear Laurence, had brought his maps; Temeraire remembered with a moment of shame how he had privately resented Laurence's taking those few moments, when they had been leaving the crevasse, to take them down and pack them up: how useless they had seemed in the moment! And how priceless now, as Laurence drew them out and laid them before Granby, who squinting by the light of a torch found the place where Iskierka had sighted the Fleur-de-Nuit. From there, they found the nearest pass she would have taken through the mountains, perhaps twenty miles distant. Their best chance—Temeraire refused to name it their
only
chance—was to catch her on the western side. Inside the borders of France.

“The ferals cannot match your pace,” Laurence said, as he rolled the maps up again. “But ask them to follow us, so long as they are able and willing: we may well be grateful of their aid at the end; or they may sight her coming out of another pass, if we have mistaken her course.”

He did not say,
This Fleur-de-Nuit may only have been a patrol-dragon; you must not raise your hopes,
or
It has been a day and a night; the egg may already have been carried deep into France,
or
Iskierka was sighted, they are looking for us; we are sure to run into a French patrol.

Laurence said none of these things, and nevertheless Temeraire was unwillingly conscious that Laurence
might
have said them. He did not wish to think these things; he struggled not to think of anything so much like despair and surrender, but the long dragging weeks of fears and searching had worn away at his own blind determination. It seemed his mind
would
fix upon them, no matter how he tried to evade the thoughts.

“If you would prefer to leave us,” Laurence was saying to Tharkay, low, “we might bribe the ferals thoroughly enough, I think, to buy your passage back to some company of the Russian army: the Cossacks were already nearing the Oder.”

“That is a sufficient distance to make it likely I should meet a company of Frenchmen, first,” Tharkay said.

They were in headlong flight by then, Iskierka outpacing him badly; a circumstance which on any other occasion would have been deeply mortifying. At present, Temeraire did not care. Iskierka might outfly him by a hundred leagues, so long as she reached the egg before the Fleur-de-Nuit reached the ominous mark upon Laurence's map: the great network of caverns just beyond the Alps labeled simply,
L'ARMÉE DE L'AIR:
the training grounds where the French aerial corps hatched most of their beasts, and trained their recruits.

Temeraire's wings ached, but he fixed determinedly on the thin pale cloud of steam that trailed Iskierka's flight and pressed onwards. To the east, the edge of the mountains, ragged like an unsharpened knife, steadily grew more visible. The sun was coming.

The sky was deep rose-grey when they finally climbed over one last gasping ridge of mountains and plunged gratefully into the pass, an hour later: Iskierka still in the lead, but Temeraire had caught up a little, navigating the higher elevations; he had grown more used to the thinness of the air. Still he was dull and laboring, and he only distantly heard Tharkay say, “Laurence,” and then a moment later, after the click of the spyglass, Laurence replying, “I see it.”

He said nothing more, and Temeraire only flew on; slowly his mind turned it over and over and finally he said, “Laurence, what is it?”

Laurence did not immediately answer, and then gently said, “There is a small camp in the valley directly behind us, with the remains of a dragon's meal, I think.”

“But that is splendid!” Temeraire cried, and meant to call to Iskierka with the news; but the tone of Laurence's voice held him. “Surely we are on their trail?” he added uncertainly.

“The fire is cold, my dear,” Laurence said. “The Fleur-de-Nuit would have spent her day there; she will have been on the wing since nightfall.”

They were a full night's flying behind her, then. Temeraire's heart sank, but then Iskierka gave a sudden roar, and even jetted a gout of flame: he jerked his head forward and saw in the distance a small dark figure against the sky, sunlight breaking over the crest of the mountains and catching its wings, and the dragon ducked its head away from the light, as if it disliked the brilliance, and dived back into shadow.

“Oh!” Temeraire cried aloud, and flung himself after Iskierka, all worry, all fear forgot; he beat desperately on even as she stretched herself out her full length, coils unraveling into a single red-and-green banner and steam hissing furiously from every spike. “How far, Laurence? How far?”

Laurence was standing in his carabiners and peering through his glass. “Not five miles distant. Surely they must have gone further in a full night's flying.”